Name given to British and American versions of art that drew inspiration from sources in popular and commercial culture. These sources included Hollywood movies, advertising, packaging, pop music and comic books. In Europe a similar movement was called Nouveau Réalisme (New Realism). Pop began in the mid 1950s and reached its peak in the 1960s. It was a revolt against prevailing orthodoxies in art and life and can be seen as one of the first manifestations of Postmodernism. Modernist critics were horrified by the Pop artists’ use of such low subject matter and by their apparently uncritical treatment of it. In fact Pop both took art into new areas of subject matter and developed new ways of presenting it in art. Chief artists in America were Lichtenstein, Oldenburg, Warhol; in Britain, Blake, Caulfield, Hamilton, Hockney, Jones, Self.